Excerpt from 'The Next American Essay'

The Next American Essay

Graywolf Press

Chapter One

John McPhee

The Search for Marvin Gardens

Go. I roll the dice-a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the
flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.

* * *

The dogs are moving (some are limping) through ruins, rubble, fire damage,
open garbage. Doorways are gone. Lath is visible in the crumbling walls of the
buildings. The street sparkles with shattered glass. I have never seen,
anywhere, so many broken windows. A sign-"Slow, Children at Play"-has been bent
backward by an automobile. At the lighthouse, the dogs turn up Pacific and
disappear. George Meade, Army engineer, built the lighthouse-brick upon brick,
six hundred thousand bricks, to reach up high enough to throw a beam twenty
miles over the sea. Meade, seven years later, saved the Union at Gettysburg.

* * *

I buy Vermont Avenue for $100. My opponent is a tall, shadowy figure, across
from me, but I know him well, and I know his game like a favorite tune. If he
can, he will always go for the quick kill. And when it is foolish to go for the
quick kill he will be foolish. On the whole, though, he is a master assessor of
percentages. It is a mistake to underestimate him. His eleven carries his top
hat to St. Charles Place, which he buys for $140.

* * *

The sidewalks of St. Charles Place have been cracked to shards by
through-growing weeds. There are no buildings. Mansions, hotels once stood here.
A few street lamps now drop cones of light on broken glass and vacant space
behind a chain-link fence that some great machine has in places bent to the
ground. Five plane trees-in full summer leaf, flecking the light-are all that
live on St. Charles Place.

* * *

Block upon block, gradually, we are cancelling each other out-in the blues,
the lavenders, the oranges, the greens. My opponent follows a plan of his own
devising. I use the Hornblower & Weeks opening and the Zuricher defense. The
first game draws tight, will soon finish. In 1971, a group of people in Racine,
Wisconsin, played for seven hundred and sixty-eight hours. A game begun a month
later in Danville, California, lasted eight hundred and twenty hours. These are
official records, and they stun us. We have been playing for eight minutes. It
amazes us that Monopoly is thought of as a long game. It is possible to play to
a complete, absolute, and final conclusion in less than fifteen minutes, all
within the rules as written. My opponent and I have done so thousands of times.
No wonder we are sitting across from each other now in this best-of-seven series
for the international singles championship of the world.

* * *

On Illinois Avenue, three men lean out from second-story windows. A girl is
coming down the street. She wears dungarees and a bright-red shirt, has ample
breasts and a Hadendoan Afro, a black halo, two feet in diameter. Ice rattles in
the glasses in the hands of the men.

"Hey, sister!"

"Come on up!"

She looks up, looks from one to another to the other, looks them flat in the
eye.

"What for?" she says, and she walks on.

* * *

I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances, for I already own Kentucky
and Indiana. My opponent pales. If he had landed first on Illinois, the game
would have been over then and there, for he has houses built on Boardwalk and
Park Place, we share the railroads equally, and we have cancelled each other
everywhere else. We never trade.

* * *

In 1852, R. B. Osborne, an immigrant Englishman, civil engineer, surveyed the
route of a railroad line that would run from Camden to Absecon Island, in New
Jersey, traversing the state from the Delaware River to the barrier beaches of
the sea. He then sketched in the plan of a "bathing village" that would surround
the eastern terminus of the line. His pen flew glibly, framing and naming
spacious avenues parallel to the shore-Mediterranean, Baltic, Oriental,
Ventnor-and narrower transsecting avenues: North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
Vermont, Connecticut, States, Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Indiana,
Illinois. The place as a whole had no name, so when he had completed the plan
Osborne wrote in large letters over the ocean, "Atlantic City." No one ever
challenged the name, or the names of Osborne's streets. Monopoly was invented in
the early nineteen-thirties by Charles B. Darrow, but Darrow was only
transliterating what Osborne had created. The railroads, crucial to any player,
were the making of Atlantic City. After the rails were down, houses and hotels
burgeoned from Mediterranean and Baltic to New York and Kentucky.
Properties-building lots-sold for as little as six dollars apiece and as much as
a thousand dollars. The original investors in the railroads and the real estate
called themselves the Camden & Atlantic Land Company. Reverently, I repeat
their names: Dwight Bell, William Coffin, John DaCosta, Daniel Deal, William
Fleming, Andrew Hay, Joseph Porter, Jonathan Pitney, Samuel Richards-founders,
fathers, forerunners, archetypical masters of the quick kill.

* * *

My opponent and I are now in a deep situation of classical Monopoly. The
torsion is almost perfect-Boardwalk and Park Place versus the brilliant reds.
His cash position is weak, though, and if I escape him now he may fade. I land
on Luxury Tax, contiguous to but in sanctuary from his power. I have four houses
on Indiana. He lands there. He concedes.

* * *

Indiana Avenue was the address of the Brighton Hotel, gone now. The Brighton
was exclusive-a word that no longer has retail value in the city. If you arrived
by automobile and tried to register at the Brighton, you were sent away.
Brighton-class people came in private railroad cars. Brighton-class people had
other private railroad cars for their horses-dawn rides on the firm sand at
water's edge, skirts flying. Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle-the sort of name
that would constrict throats in Philadelphia-lived, much of the year, in the
Brighton.

* * *

Colonel Sanders' fried chicken is on Kentucky Avenue. So is Clifton's Club
Harlem, with the Sepia Revue and the Sepia Follies, featuring the Honey Bees,
the Fashions, and the Lords.

* * *

My opponent and I, many years ago, played 2,428 games of Monopoly in a single
season. He was then a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School, and he was
working for a downtown firm, looking up law. Two people we knew-one from Chase
Manhattan, the other from Morgan, Stanley-tried to get into the game, but after
a few rounds we found that they were not in the conversation and we sent them
home. Monopoly should always be mano a mano anyway. My opponent won 1,199
games, and so did I. Thirty were ties. He was called into the Army, and we
stopped just there. Now, in Game 2 of the series, I go immediately to jail, and
again to jail while my opponent seines property. He is dumbfoundingly lucky. He
wins in twelve minutes.

* * *

Visiting hours are daily, eleven to two; Sunday, eleven to one; evenings, six
to nine. "NO MINORS, NO FOOD, Immediate Family Only Allowed in Jail." All this
above a blue steel door in a blue cement wall in the windowless interior of the
basement of the city hall. The desk sergeant sits opposite the door to the jail.
In a cigar box in front of him are pills in every color, a banquet of fruit
salad an inch and a half deep-leapers, co-pilots, footballs, truck drivers,
peanuts, blue angels, yellow jackets, redbirds, rainbows. Near the desk are two
soldiers, waiting to go through the blue door. They are about eighteen years
old. One of them is trying hard to light a cigarette. His wrists are in steel
cuffs. A military policeman waits, too. He is a year or so older than the
soldiers, taller, studious in appearance, gentle, fat. On a bench against a wall
sits a good-looking girl in slacks. The blue door rattles, swings heavily open.
A turnkey stands in the doorway. "Don't you guys kill yourselves back there
now," says the sergeant to the soldiers.

"One kid, he overdosed himself about ten and a half hours ago," says the M.P.

The M.P., the soldiers, the turnkey, and the girl on the bench are white. The
sergeant is black. "If you take off the handcuffs, take off the belts," says the
sergeant to the M.P. "I don't want them hanging themselves back there." The door
shuts and its tumblers move. When it opens again, five minutes later, a young
white man in sandals and dungarees and a blue polo shirt emerges. His hair is in
a ponytail. He has no beard. He grins at the good-looking girl. She rises, joins
him. The sergeant hands him a manila envelope. From it he removes his belt and a
small notebook. He borrows a pencil, makes an entry in the notebook. He is out
of jail, free. What did he do? He offended Atlantic City in some way. He spent a
night in the jail. In the nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic City went to
jail, directly to jail, did not pass Go, for appearing in topless bathing suits
on the beach. A city statute requiring all men to wear full-length bathing suits
was not seriously challenged until 1937, and the first year in which a man could
legally go bare-chested on the beach was 1940.

* * *

Game 3. After seventeen minutes, I am ready to begin construction on
overpriced and sluggish Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Nothing else
being open, opponent concedes.

* * *

The physical profile of streets perpendicular to the shore is something like
a playground slide. It begins in the high skyline of Boardwalk hotels, plummets
into warrens of "side-avenue" motels, crosses Pacific, slopes through church
missions, convalescent homes, burlesque houses, rooming houses, and liquor
stores, crosses Atlantic, and runs level through the bombed-out ghetto as
far-Baltic, Mediterranean-as the eye can see. North Carolina Avenue, for
example, is flanked at its beach end by the Chalfonte and the Haddon Hall (908
rooms, air-conditioned), where, according to one biographer, John Philip Sousa
(1854-1932) first played when he was twenty-two, insisting, even then, that
everyone call him by his entire name. Behind these big hotels, motels-Barbizon,
Catalina-crouch. Between Pacific and Atlantic is an occasional house from
1910-wooden porch, wooden mullions, old yellow paint-and two churches, a package
store, a strip show, a dealer in fruits and vegetables. Then, beyond Atlantic
Avenue, North Carolina moves on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the city, and
it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually exploded. It
is not bomb damage. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are
scattered in the street. People sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a Monday
morning. When they go off to wait in unemployment lines, they wait sometimes two
hours. Between Mediterranean and Baltic runs a chain-link fence, enclosing
rubble. A patrol car sits idling by the curb. In the back seat is a German
shepherd. A sign on the fence says, "Beware of Bad Dogs."

Mediterranean and Baltic are the principal avenues of the ghetto. Dogs are
everywhere. A pack of seven passes me. Block after block, there are three-story
brick row houses. Whole segments of them are abandoned, a thousand broken
windows. Some parts are intact, occupied. A mattress lies in the street, soaking
in a pool of water. Wet stuffing is coming out of the mattress. A postman is
having a rye and a beer in the Plantation Bar at nine-fifteen in the morning. I
ask him idly if he knows where Marvin Gardens is. He does not. "HOOKED AND NEED
HELP? CONTACT N.A.R.C.O." "REVIVAL NOW GOING ON, CONDUCTED BY REVEREND H.
HENDERSON OF TEXAS." These are signboards on Mediterranean and Baltic. The
second one is upside down and leans against a boarded-up window of the Faith
Temple Church of God in Christ. There is an old peeling poster on a warehouse
wall showing a figure in an electric chair. "The Black Panther Manifesto" is the
title of the poster, and its message is, or was, that "the fascists have already
decided in advance to murder Chairman Bobby Seale in the electric chair." I pass
an old woman who carries a bucket. She wears blue sneakers, worn through. Her
feet spill out. She wears red socks, rolled at the knees. A white handkerchief,
spread over her head, is knotted at the corners. Does she know where Marvin
Gardens is? "I sure don't know," she says, setting down the bucket. "I sure
don't know. I've heard of it somewhere, but I just can't say where." I walk on,
through a block of shattered glass. The glass crunches underfoot like coarse
sand. I remember when I first came here-a long train ride from Trenton, long
ago, games of poker in the train-to play basketball against Atlantic City. We
were half black, they were all black. We scored forty points, they scored
eighty, or something like it. What I remember most is that they had glass
backboards-glittering, pendent, expensive glass backboards, a rarity then in
high schools, even in colleges, the only ones we played on all year.

I turn on Pennsylvania, and start back toward the sea. The windows of the
Hotel Astoria, on Pennsylvania near Baltic, are boarded up. A sheet of unpainted
plywood is the door, and in it is a triangular peephole that now frames an eye.
The plywood door opens. A man answers my question. Rooms there are six, seven,
and ten dollars a week. I thank him for the information and move on, emerging
from the ghetto at the Catholic Daughters of America Women's Guest House,
between Atlantic and Pacific. Between Pacific and the Boardwalk are the blinking
vacancy signs of the Aristocrat and Colton Manor motels. Pennsylvania terminates
at the Sheraton-Seaside thirty-two dollars a day, ocean corner. I take a walk on
the Boardwalk and into the Holiday Inn (twenty-three stories). A guest is
registering. "You reserved for Wednesday, and this is Monday," the clerk tells
him. "But that's all right. We have plenty of rooms." The clerk is very
young, female, and has soft brown hair that hangs below her waist. Her superior
kicks her.

He is a middle-aged man with red spiderwebs in his face. He is jacketed and
tied. He takes her aside. "Don't say `plenty,'" he says. "Say `You are
fortunate, sir. We have rooms available.'"

The face of the young woman turns sour. "We have all the rooms you need," she
says to the customer, and, to her superior, "How's that?"

* * *

Game 4. My opponent's luck has become abrasive. He has Boardwalk and Park
Place, and has sealed the board.